The origin of the Usher of the Black Rod goes back to early fourteenth century England . Today, with no royal duties to perform, the Usher knocks on the doors of the House of Commons with the Black Rod at the start of Parliament to summon the members. The rod is a symbol for the authority of debate in the upper house.
We of The Black Rod have adopted the symbol to knock some sense and the right questions into the heads of Legislators, pundits, and other opinion makers.

About Me

We are citizen journalists in Winnipeg. When not breaking exclusive stories, we analyze news coverage by the mainstream media and highlight bias, ignorance, incompetence, flawed logic, missed angles and, where warranted, good work. We serve as the only overall news monitors in the province of Manitoba. We do the same with politicians (who require even more monitoring.) EMAIL: black_rod_usher@yahoo.com

Thursday, June 05, 2014

Too much of her own money, not enough of yours. Judy runs for Mayor.

When
it comes to electing a mayor, nothing says a city is dynamic, bold,
and thriving like a stara baba collecting an old-age pension.

This
week Judy Wasylycia-Leis, 63 in August, announced her second run at
the mayor's job. She still has zero experience at City Hall, still
marches to the orders of the NDP, collects two retirement pensions and
would be getting a third, her old age security cheque, if Mayor. Do you feel the excitement, yet?

Despite
getting trounced by Sam Katz in the mayoral election four years ago,
JWL thinks her campaign the second time around needs only minor
tinkering. Most specifically, she doesn't have to pretend to be
apologetic for promising higher taxes.

Katz
handily defeated JWL by at least paying lip service to protecting
seniors and low-income homeowners from her promised tax hikes. Of
course, it turns out he was either lying or ..., well, lying, because
the first thing he did after re-election was start raising property
taxes.

JWL
can now proudly make tax hikes front and centre to her campaign for
Mayor because most of the other candidates for the job also call for
higher taxes for -- wait for it -- infrastructure. There. The magic word. Say it and you can spend endlessly, without shame or regret.

And
JWL is proof of that. On the very first day of her campaign she
declared herself in favour of spending $4 billion on a citywide bus
rapid transit system and against a referendum to ask the taxpaying
public if BRT was their priority too.

On
her second day she spelled out her formula for constant tax
increases---inflation plus growth. The Winnipeg Free Press worked out
that this would have meant a tax increase of 3.5 percent in 2014
instead of Sam Katz's 2.95 percent.

Vote Judy for higher taxes and
rampant spending. And that's a promise.

Oh, and here's the joke. You won't find JWL taking a bus.
Like all the politicians who want to spend your money on a
gold-plated public transit system, she's much too busy to take the bus. She brags she rides her bike when she's not driving.

On
the day she announced her run for Mayor, JWL told CJOB her 25
year-old son was biking home to Winnipeg from the University of
Waterloo. She wanted him to eventually move here after graduation to
work, and she said, she didn't want to leave him a second-class city
without a modern transit system. So ... what's going to keep an educated
young man in his mid-20's in Winnipeg? The ability to take a bus
around town?

Don't laugh until you see his field of study:

(from the blog Jessica's Transit Talks http://winnipegtransittalks.com/)"...
he’s at the University of Waterloo doing his masters in environmental
studies. His whole research area is in community resilience and his
thesis is going to be on linking culture and art, specifically linking
festivals as a vehicle for helping build a transformative society that
is sustainable in the face of peak oil and environmental deprivation
and economic collapse.”

Okay, laugh now.

During
the last election, we pointed out how completely out of touch with the
voters 'Just Judy' was. Her whole life had been spent as a soldier in
the NDP army, towing the party line, voting the party line, living the
party life.

Having never worked a day in her life in a real job, she had no clue what life was like for an ordinary working family.

It was only during this campaign when we realized how far off the mark we were. Judy Wasylycia-Leis is even more out of touch with the average taxpayer than we ever imagined.

She's a white-wine socialist. A one-percenter slumming as a 'woman of the people.' She pledged on radio to give her MP's pension to charity if elected mayor. That means she's willing to give away at the least $68,000 a year without a thought.
And, she added proudly, she'll give away her MLA's pension from the
Manitoba Legislature, as well. In 2010 she actually said she didn't know how much her MLA pension was, that's how insignificant it was to her bottom line.

In a political riding that's one of the poorest in the country, Judy Wasylycia-Leis is ready to give away -- what do you say?-- at least $80,000 in total pension income because she will be so flush that she won't need the money.

Yep,
she really relates to her former constituents, the very people she
intends to soak with higher property taxes if she gets the chance so
that she can spend their money on her boutique projects - - white
elephant museums, a BRT system they'll never use, interpretive centres
nobody wanted, a spectacular exhibit for polar bears that they can't
afford to attend or bring their children.

Judy Wasylycia-Leis has her priorities, only they're not the public's.

Listen to the so-called pundits and they'll tell you JWL is the front-runner in a field of right-wing candidates and her.

They're wrong.

This election is not about political wings. It's about voting for unending tax increases or not.

Since
these pundits are all in well-paying jobs where annual tax increases
are just a mosquito bite, they're in favour of spending on boutique
projects. (Winnipeg Free Press columnists and editorialists earn
$70,000 and up and have guaranteed jobs for life.) They'll
be promoting the tax hikers over the tax resisters and, of course, the
biggest spender-to-be will get the most favourable coverage.

Current Mayor Sam Katz is not going to run again. You can call him many things, but stupid is not one of them. To run for Mayor again, Katz would have to run against himself.
In the 2010 election he either lied about not raising taxes or
flip-flopped so quickly that there's no difference. In either case,
he's proven he can't be trusted to keep his word.

He
would be running with the stink of Phil Sheegl choking everyone around
him. Sam Katz brought Sheegl into civic government, endorsed him,
publicly insulted anyone who challenged Sheegl's competence as the
city's Chief Administrative Officer, covered up as long as he could for
the scandals sweeping Winnipeg that all lead right Sheegl's office.
Katz would be carrying that dead albatross around his neck everywhere
he went.

Katz
would be running on a track record of his own incompetence. Remember
his own declarations that the new football stadium wouldn't cost
taxpayers a cent more because of a "guaranteed maxium price"? Or his
claim that he knew all along that the "guaranteed maximum price" for
the new police station was not guaranteed, nor a maximum.

And,
of course, there's that niggling question of how Sam Katz, the Mayor,
managed to buy a million dollar house in Phoenix for $10 from a relative
of an official of Shindo, the company that got the contract for four
new firehalls from Phil Sheegl after a rigged bidding process that
eliminated every other potential contender. When the sale was revealed,
Katz said he paid cash for the house above the $10 on the books, but
he offered no proof, which, of course is the purpose of an alleged cash transaction.

So there won't be a rematch between Sam and 'JustJudy'. Not that it matters.

Because she's not really running for mayor. Remember, she's a party hack and has always been a party hack. She's
running as a trial horse for the provincial NDP, which wants to see
prior to the next provincial election just how much the NDP brand
repels voters. They want to see if they can buy their way back
into office, if taxpayers will forgive the increase in PST if the
government can utter the magic word -- infrastructure -- and spend, spend, spend to victory.

In the Brave New World of the NDP, even a stara baba has her role to play.